People were pushing for those in the 90s. I think it never got adopted because of the loss of transparency on the windshield (AFAIK, there's an international standard that most countries go beyond, and it's way above 50%).

There is also some dispute over the direction, because polarized sunglasses filter out horizontal light, but we would want this system to filter out vertical light because of the way things reflect. I guess this wouldn't be a showstopper to turning it into law, but it was loud at the time.

> high-trust society that solved coordination problems through legislation

What is the point of being high trust in the first place if you have to have a government violence backed law for everything?

High trust societies don't have governments dealing BS minutia like automobile headlights. That is expensive in all sorts of ways, assuming you even do it right and don't accidentally create some perverse rent seeking bureaucracy or certification group that has incentive to push things in a dumb direction over time. And high trust societies don't need to do that stuff because they're high trust and collaborative in the first place so those problems solve themselves. The big players identify the problem, mostly solve it with some sort of industry standard, and whatever rounding error is left is a nuisance so small it's not worth addressing.

This is how like the overwhelming majority of automotive (and a million other industries too, computer stuff being a particularly relevant one here) stuff was done before regulation and how a lot of the more cutting edge stuff is still done now with the added step of the regulator saying "hey that thing everyone's mostly doing, it's law now, errybody do it" once things settle.

I don't mean to pick on you specifically, the questionable take you're peddling is pervasive all over HN.

The first thing you do, if you think you're coming into a business partnership where you and your partner are on the same page, mutually committed to communal success, is have a lawyer write up a bunch of provisions binding you to the continuation of that attitude and mitigating a bunch of incentive misalignments and opportunities to defect against your partner profitably.

Successful government regulation is the operationalization and protection of self-regulation by legal bonds against defectors, more often than it is totally opposed by capital.

High-trust societies are not some Moldbug-Thielian neofeudalist-libertarian ethnically homogeneous blob, they're just societies that try to fight against their coordination problems with social norms, and when social norms prove insufficient*, by collectively bargaining with each other on a code of conduct. We call that government.

*Money is the root of all evil - it is historically synonymous with an attempt to bargain with opponents who refuse the same social norms, with wergild, with denominated debt-slavery, with foreign trade interactions. Monetary exchange is a mode of interaction for when trust breaks down. In the other direction, money is what poisons relationships and wrecks norms; Consult The Social Network or Treasure of the Sierra Madre for examples.

Wouldn't that, uh, make your own headlights invisible to you?

Polarized light reflecting off a textured surface scrambles into nonpolarized light.

There are modest costs (signage & road markings shouldn't be perfectly smooth, retroreflectors work a little differently, and you lose a certain percent efficiency), but they're much less intense than the costs of the current situation.